Some new lobby hosting that should make AI games much easier to create! Also better support for building multiplayer games that have pre-defined AI slots, including pre-built Player vs AI team games

More stability, performance and bug fixing; We had a few late fixes come in today, so you may see another very small build increment over the weekend. The changes will be minimal if so.

Zoom in the system editor should behave like normal once more

Air focused AIs should once again build more than one factory

More adjustments to orbital strat icons ; still WIP, but should be easier to manage your orbital units

Quite a few additional naval and land pathing fixes; Barring new reports, most of the major pathing issues should be resolved; please report if you find new ones, especially if they're happening a lot or are easy to reproduce

A lot more back end work for stability, performance and overall game experience. There is at least one known server crash related to moving units through the celestial/deep space regions. We're still looking for a 100% repro, however. If you find something you're doing crashes your server every time, please let us know on the forums!
We have changed how games load - as soon as a lobby is hosted, the game server starts preparing the planet, both on the server and locally. If you notice "Connect to server" taking a little while, be patient. When you get into the lobby, you should see a status light on the solar system info that changes from red to yellow to green. Once it's green, if everyone is ready, you should see the game start very quickly.
Significant changes to building placement code ; you should see fewer false positives on placement, as well as more accurate information when getting invalid/red placement warnings
Confirmation buttons exist now for: Leave a game lobby, leave a live game, quit the program
Default game type switched back to FFA from Vs. AI
Changes to lobby layout
Max planet sizes are now clamped to 1200 for gameplay ; you can make bigger planets, but we need more work before we can unlock play on larger planets
Start zone sizing should now be accuratley represented
Ongoing work on the pathing
AIs build defenses more
AIs now will update their rally points for units being generated
AI should make better use of advanced fabbers again and also build many more advanced factories again
AI can now build defenses in expansion bases
AI can now build advanced mexes on existing basic mexes
Balance Changes:
WIP: Fairly significant changes to naval; this is still very in progress, and only basic units have really been modified yet. Advanced will get a pass next. Too many changes to list individually.
Radar and Advanced Radar can now be built on water
Radar and Advanced Radar require your energy to be at least 90% efficient to operate (If you have 10k power and are using more than approximately 11,000 power, you will stall your radar)
Missile ship's range has been decreased to be more inline with normal tactical missile launcher; Missile ship now also charges more slowly than before. Fire time is still 10 seconds, but if you're running a deficit energy economy, it will slow down your rate of fire.
Tactical Missile Launcher has the same limits as the Missile Ship - stalled energy economy will have more of an impact on it's ability to fire
Ion Defense Cannon: Changes to help make it more accurate (more work is still needed); This unit is NOT designed to take out orbital fighters.

Beta Build: 55493
A number of server and client crash fixes, including a number of ATI specific and Mac ATI specific issues.
Allow for water start spots
All basic factories can now be built by advanced fabbers

A great many changes in this build are not necessarily obvious simply by looking at the build. A lot of plumbing work and behind the scenes to continue to improve the build, and to prepare for still to come changes. These patch notes do not include all of the many changes in this build.

Fix for new Steam players needing to exit and re-enter the game before they can create or find a match.

Improvements to building placement. More to come on this front.

Significant changes to how information is sent to the client. This should result in significantly reduced network utilization. It has been tested pretty thoroughly by the team, but it's a big change. Please report to the forums if you find strange new behavior you've never seen before. Be as detailed as you can to help us better track down new issues.

Lava planets are currently disabled for play, due to some known pathing / placement issues in relation to having actual lava on them now. You can still build them in the system editor.

Additional client and server crash fixes.

Number of Mac shader and render fixes.

More HDR tuning.

More graphics performance and compatibility work.

AI Performance improvements

AI continues to get smarter, and make better use of existing systems. We will have a way to handicap the AI very soon.

AI now has an economic scale; Once you host an AI game, you have a player and AI economic scale, so you can adjust difficulty for both yourself and for the AI. If you want to pure sandbox, you can set the AI to 0. This is a temporary way to provide an AI difficulty slider until we get more robust lobby options in place.

Better information provided now in celestial view for current orbits and interception paths

Laser towers should have an easier time hitting bots now

Metal spots should no longer be destroyable except by asteroid impact.

Quite a few simulation terminated fixes

Units rolling off a factory can no longer be interrupted ; They will finish roll off before starting up their next task

A number of AI improvements: Can now build storage, anti-nukes, mobile aa and mobile artillery; They will more aggressively defend their mexes (metal extractors) with static defenses, and they will be trying to expand more rapidly; In general, they should also get stuck on various tasks much less frequently

Bombers should be able to hit more accurately again. They are not done, but they were a little over broken while we work on carpet bombing functionality.

Orbital Laser now correctly requires energy to function, which means it will slow down the overall speed at which it can fire.